James Earl Ray
| James Earl Ray | |
|---|---|
Mug shot of Ray taken in 1955
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| Born |
March 10, 1928 Alton, Illinois, United States |
| Died | April 23, 1998 (aged 70) Nashville, Tennessee, United States |
| Cause of death | Hepatitis C |
| Criminal penalty | 99 years imprisonment (one year was added after his re-capture for a total of 100 years) |
| Spouse(s) | Anna Sandhu Ray (divorced) |
| Parent(s) | James Gerald Ray Lucille Ray |
| Conviction(s) |
Murder, prison escape, armed robbery, burglary |
James Earl Ray (March 10, 1928 – April 23, 1998) assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Ray was convicted on his 41st birthday after entering a guilty plea to forgo a jury trial. Had he been found guilty by jury trial, he would have been eligible for the death penalty. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted his confession and tried unsuccessfully to gain access to a retrial. In 1998, Ray died in prison of complications due to chronic hepatitis C infection. He had served 29 years in prison at the time of his death.
Ray was born to a poor family on March 10, 1928, in Alton, Illinois, the son of Lucille (Maher) and George Ellis Ray. He had Welsh, Scots, and Irish ancestry, and was raised Catholic. In February 1935, Ray's father, known by the nickname Speedy, passed a bad check in Alton, Illinois, then moved to Ewing, Missouri, where the family had to change their name to Raynes to avoid law enforcement. Ray left school at the age of fifteen. He joined the U.S. Army at the close of World War II and served in Germany.
His first conviction for criminal activity, a burglary in California, came in 1949. In 1952 he served two years for the armed robbery of a taxi driver in Illinois. In 1955, he was convicted of mail fraud after stealing money orders in Hannibal, Missouri, and then forging them to take a trip to Florida. He served three years at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. In 1959 he was caught stealing $120 in an armed robbery of a St. Louis Kroger store. Ray was sentenced to twenty years in prison for repeated offenses. He escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967 by hiding in a truck transporting bread from the prison bakery.
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